Five Fitness Profiles

Fitness Level Two:  Launcher/Beginner Athlete.

Profile. Launchers past the age of 30-40 risk being on a downward fitness slide. A lack of regular exercise pushes them closer to chronic illness. But an aversion to exertion, along with time and energy restraints, can complicate commitment to a regular exercise regimen.

• Do you have little or no recent fitness exercise background? 
• Would you call yourself a beginner athlete (walker/jogger)? 
• Are you afraid of being too slow or not fast enough to keep up?
• Are you okay with walking slowly for 15-20 minutes several times a week?
• Is the prospect of exercising beyond thirty minutes daunting?
• Do you suffer from insomnia, lack of energy, muscle pain and stiffness?
• Are you skeptical of your potential to develop significant fitness? 
• Are you afraid you can’t adopt the discipline of recreational athleticism?

Prerequisites. Launching fitness activity requires attention to several basic factors.  It could be difficult to succeed in this program without careful consideration of the following from the outset.

• Reconfirming priorities so one manages to train several times a week, as well as eating sensibly for the sake of your personal health and fitness.
• Nurturing a sense of empowerment that evolves when exerting oneself deliberately and non-injuriously for the sake of personal health and fitness. 
• Creating an enjoyable and sustainable fitness exercise routine so one looks forward to all aspects of the workout activity—before, during, and after.

Nurturing a visceral sense of being individually fit, with others. Even the experience of the most individually motivated person can be enhanced in a group.

Fitness Level Three: Practitioner/Intermediate Athlete

Profile. As beginners-becoming-intermediate athletes, practitioners need continuing support to incorporate the discipline of regular fitness training.

• Do you train in a catch-as-catch-can basis, at odd hours?
• Do you usually feel that your workouts are too short, rushed, or compressed?
• Are you bothered by frequent, nagging injuries you must train through?
• Do you train three times a week sometimes, but more often only once or twice?
• Do you believe in a no-pain, no-gain approach to fitness training?
• Do you wish you had time for stretching or strengthening, but can seldom find it?
• Is regular training relegated to a low-priority item compared to work and family?

Prerequisites. Practitioners will practice the skills and habits necessary to become full-fledged intermediate athletes. This requires the following commitments.

• A commitment to the discipline of regular training: workouts in scheduled time slots, with rational and non-injurious ability-building exertion structures.
• A determined focus during workouts to practice running skills, from the rudimentary to the advanced, until they become habitual.
• A commitment to recognizing, reducing, and ultimately eliminating pain during the fitness training and racing processes. The new mantra is no pain brings gain.
• The realization that training can be shared in a supportive group that shows up regularly and enjoys the fitness training process in one another’s company.

Fitness Level Four:  Advanced Racers.

Profile.  Advanced racers want to do a specific race, but they aren’t clear about how to train for it effectively.  Their training is fraught with pitfalls based on limited experience, incorrect ideas, and haphazard planning, all of which prevents them from becoming fully racing fit. 

Are you sometimes in a quandary about how to answer the following perennial training questions?

• How can I structure the exertion of my workouts to build my racing ability?  Mild, light, steady state, threshold, ragged-edge, and maximum?
• How hard should I train to optimize my workout efforts?  Very easy, easy, moderate, hard, very hard, all-out?
• How long should my workouts be (in minutes)? 
• How many times a week should I train? 
• How do I know when I’m adequately recovered?
• What role does fatigue play in the training process?
• How can I get rid of chronic injury.
• How can I have my best energy for every race? 

Advanced racers are interested in the way the hard-easy system answers these questions.  As such, their racing goals are a work in progress, as the more they learn about the training process, the more their goals evolve, along with the means to achieve them. 

Prerequisites.  Advanced athletes are becoming racing fit—a transformation from mere practitioner to advanced competitive racer.  It helps to already possess a predisposition to becoming more competitive.  The pathway there challenges like a part-time job. 

• It helps to focus on doing certain race events while practicing the means to develop a full complement of racing abilities for them. 
• It helps to start at a modest workout effort level for the sake of gradually and incrementally approaching a harder and more optimal level. 
• It helps to have the time to train on a strict timetable, with three major workouts scheduled in regular weekly time slots, and with 2 or 3 recovery runs in between. 
• It helps to review and practice the skills of running, already made habitual at the Practitioner level, where basic skills are a major and constant training focus.

Level 5: Master Racer

Profile. Masters are in the process of becoming experts in their field. A master racer could be a teacher or a coach because he/she has made a study of the game. Masters know the training process from vast experience.

• Yet even masters have more to learn.  Though they know, for instance, about training periods and training cycles, they may not yet be able to train progressively from year to year. Something invariably comes up to prevent their best performance.
• They may know how to train hard several times a week, yet they have trouble recovering adequately for months without injury, illness, or exhaustion. Highly competitive by nature, they haven’t mastered their deepest natural self.
• Knowing how to train is not the same as training well. In translating knowledge into action, one must play with the training process. This really means playing harmoniously with one’s physical nature, finding fun and satisfaction in the flow of it.

Prerequisites. A master racer must be humble enough to accept coaching advice and counsel. At the master level, the air of knowledge is rarified.  A master is always searching for a more knowledgeable mind. No one knows it all, but some know enough to point at pathways.

• A master should look to regular meditation as a means of adjusting to a rapidly changing physical, mental, and spiritual landscape. There is nothing magical about meditation. It’s just a matter of taking the time to sit comfortably in silence.
• One must abide in the knowledge that inspiration comes to those who attend to themselves at the deepest level. Not so much to the thoughts that come, but to the space between thoughts where pure awareness resides. 
• We tend to follow our thinking, rather than our intuition; our mind, rather than our heart; our ego-self, rather than our sensing, feeling body. There’s meditation practice, and there’s actual practice in the real world. Mastery resides in both.